9/29/10

This week in Language Arts nothing new has occurred in the way of technology. My students are practicing blending letter sounds into words and they are doing such a great job. I have introduced letter magnets and a cookie sheet as a center activity. My kindergartners just loved rearranging the letters in an effort to make words.  I recently found out that I can borrow a projector from the library to use which will connect to the web as well as play dvd’s so I am anxious to find out what I need to do to get that technology into my classroom. Another student mentioned the ease of bookmarking with Delicious that way she only needs to pull up that website instead of trying to email links from home to work, etc. I think that is a great idea and I am glad that she shared that. I would have made it to that thinking eventually but now I am that much further along. Another idea that I would like to pursue is to provide a list of web resources that my parents can use to help their children with their studies and some websites that they can explore with their children to just spend time together. If my families have the resource of a computer I want to make sure that I can assist them in finding meaningful learning activities that would support and encourage the success of their child.

Week of 9/20/2010

Okay, so I was challenged to come up with a way to use this “new literacy” in my kindergarten classroom. Thank you for that by the way. My first thought was oh my goodness that is just one more thing to do! My second thought was, “where on heaven or earth am I going to find the time to actually think about how to use this “new literacy”?” I know that this is an amazing concept and one that many people will benefit from, it just seems stressful to me to try to figure out how I will use or implement this. So, as I continue to tackle one thing at a time, first things first. In an effort to not completely stress out I will do what is in front of me and prioritize my class, my life and anything else that I can prioritize and this challenge will be on that list! It may take a bit for me to actually make it here; however I will leave no challenge untouched! Lol

As for the web addresses for grants, thank you very much! I’m not quite sure how that all works but I will add it also to my list of priorities. Thank you so much for your thoughtful comments Tracy and Laura.

First Official Post - 9/15/10

Okay so I have been reading about “new literacy” and it is so exciting to see how much technology would benefit our students! I love all of the ideas, from blogging to virtual fieldtrips, texting, using bookmarking websites, etc. What bothers me is that most of our schools do not have the money to make this available in our classrooms. My district is one of those districts that does not have enough money to make all of these things available and given that we are located in Arizona, I don’t know if we ever will. All of that aside, I teach kindergarten and quite a bit of what I read I just don’t imagine using in my classroom. I do think that my team as well as the rest of our teachers would benefit from learning about this “new literacy” and may even brainstorm ways that we can include this in our classrooms. I certainly see this being a valuable tool for upper grades and I know that this would excite the student which then creates more learning. I also see that parents may benefit from becoming aware of the varieties of sites there are that would help them to help their children become more successful students.

I Did It!

Well, I did it! I actually created a blog for my Language Arts class. It was easy as this site did all the work. Now comes the hard part, creating an entry each week relating to my learning. On second thought that should be pretty easy to write what I'm thinking, look I just did!